Student transportation involves a lot of moving parts and can be a source of a district's greatest risk exposure. Each year there are numerous reports of students getting on the wrong bus, getting off at the wrong bus stop, failing to return home from field trips or even worse, not getting off the bus at all—in some cases with fatal consequences. In addition modern terrorism has no limits and can strike anywhere, at any time and claim any victim. Knowing the location of a student and the specific bus transporting the student and the locations where the student boarded and disembarked from the school bus is tremendously useful for the security of the students and the peace of mind of the parents and the school administration both at the school level and the school district level. This information is enormously helpful to law enforcement when a bus has been attacked, high jacked or a student is believed kidnapped or missing.
It would be tremendously valuable to have access to the real-time location of any school bus in a school district bus fleet and also the real-time specific identify of all students riding each school bus. Besides providing a high level of security, such access monitoring prevents or minimizes the chance of students becoming lost by boarding or exiting a school bus at the wrong assigned stop location.
The identity of the students boarding or exiting the bus is confirmed and recorded by bio-metrically iris scanning the student. In the preferred embodiment the scanning process would be completely mobile so that the students boarding or exiting the bus can be biometrically iris scanned upon entrance or anywhere around the bus. Scan identification processing can be conducted even outside the bus at the back, side or front door entries. A mobile scanning capability provides the ability to identify and process special needs students who have exceptional transportation requirements, such as students confined to a wheelchair.
Knowing what bus a student is being transported on and the location of the bus real-time, is particularly advantageous in the event of a student with a medical emergency or a bus accident. Medical information of a student with special medical problems is maintained in the student data file maintained at the school and/or the school district network server. If a medical emergency arises for a student on a bus during school bus transportation, the bus driver can alert the dispatcher or other administrators at the school transportation department.(collectively referred to as the “school transportation department”) of the medical emergency identifying the student by name or by a student identification number. The dispatcher or other equivalent personnel can notify the appropriate medical responder of the medical emergency, identify the student involved and supply the accurate location of the bus. When the time is appropriate, the dispatcher or other equivalent personnel can transmit the medical information in the student's file verbally or by text or email message to a smart phone or computer tablet so the medical responder can treat the student with accurate medical treatment.
School buses have been hijacked in the past and government terror officials list school buses as targets. With the present system and method the bus driver can simply activate an alarm from the computer tablet used in the present invention. Activation of the alarm immediately sends an emergency notification to the transportation dispatcher or other equivalent personnel. The dispatcher or equivalent personnel notifies law enforcement and identifies the bus and gives the real-time location of the bus and optionally the specific students on board the bus.
The present system and method can be used for transportation to and from school and any other student transportation including field trips. For field trips each student will be assigned a specific bus and each student will be scanned to identify when the student boards the bus. When the student disembarks at the field trip destination, the student will be scanned again. At the completion of the field trip, the students will return to their assigned bus and be scanned for identification at boarding. If a student fails to board the assigned bus for the return trip at the completion of loading the bus, the scanning system will sound and/or visually signal that a student is missing. The driver will take appropriate action as established by the school or school district administration policy. If all the students have boarded their assigned bus, they will make the return trip. When the bus returns to the drop off point, students will be scanned again for identification assuring all students have returned and exited the bus. In this process all students can be accounted for that made the field trip.
A reoccurring problem with school bus transportation is substitute drivers not being familiar with an assigned daily route. Over time the substitute drivers learn the school bus routes, but before they master the routes, they must rely on hardcopy maps or typed instructions furnished by the school district transportation department. The computer tablet with an embedded GPS system can display or both audibly or visually provide navigation for the designated bus route to guide or assist the substitute driver.
It is vital for security and other reasons described above to furnish a method and system that can enable school district transportation administrators to have real-time information for the location of each of its school buses and the identity of all students on the bus real-time during all types of daily school transportation.
At the present time most school districts rely on the bus driver to identify the students boarding the bus by visual recognition and/or by name recognition. The bus driver may or may not have a check off list of the names of all the students scheduled for his bus for the bus route. It is a fully manual system and there is no accurate way for the school transportation or district administration to determine real-time what students are on-board the bus or what students have disembarked from the bus. Although some school districts have the bus driver report into the appropriate school district department by radio or cell phone when a student is absent from assigned bus transportation. There is no current system that presently exists, except the system of the present invention that accurately identifies each student that has boarded a school bus or disembarked from a school bus.
Some school districts have initiated an ID card system where the card can be read by an proximity reader mounted on the interior of the bus. This was an improvement over the manual system discussed above. However the system and method are far from accurate. Students can forget or lose or have stolen the ID card/badge or the students can substitute or swap card/badges among themselves. In contrast the present system eliminates the need for ID cards or badges and there is no way that a student can lose or substitute an iris identification. The iris bio-metric identification is a fool proof way to identify a student because each person's iris is unique to that person. No two people have the same distinctive iris patterns, even identical twins. The left and right iris of the same person are also different patterns. The present system and method is one of the most accurate biometric processes available for identification purposes. It is mobile and can be used anywhere inside or outside the bus, It is accurate and with a good reading always correctly identifies the student assuming that the student has been previously enrolled in the database and his scanned enrollment reading is stored in a school district's Cloud database server.
All other solutions being used are found to be inaccurate, inconsistent, non-secure products using ID identification cards, RFID tags or bar code components to track students. These components can easily be lost, forgotten, misplace or traded. The iris bio-metric solution is the one and only 99.5% accurate and most ideal system available for school transportation requirements. The system and method of the present invention completely separates itself from any other solution on the market with its mobility, accuracy and identification consistency.